With our farmers’ markets going full force rippling with tomatoes, corn, berries, fruits and every kind of harvested vegetable able to grow well enough in our climate, I look specifically at what I can use to make this–the quintessential summer cobbler with fruit, berries or a mixture.

Defining what a cobbler is can be tricky business.  In strict culinary parlance, it’s basically stewed fruit topped with a kind of drop-biscuit dough and baked.

Two types of peach cobbler: crunchy (left) and classic

 

But what also doubles in cobbler-speak are preparations like pandowdy, grunt, slump and sonker, which is a deep-dish pie unique to North Carolina country cooking.

The New York Times  recently published their usual definitive take on cobbler and offered a mixed fruit variety topped with a sweet biscuit dough.  Yet there are variations on cobblers that I find are not quite like their cousins of the slump-grump-pandowdy family.  You can wrap up summer fruit in batter doughs, cake-like toppings and pastry covers, the latter being my favorite way with cobblers.

My version of the NYTimes mixed fruit cobbler

I did, however, make the recipe (see link) from the Times, and it was delicious (see recipe link).  I made one major change, however.  The recipes calls for 10 cups of mixed fruits and berries, which I halved down to 5 cups, enough to fill an 8-inch square pan instead of the 9 by 13 inch pan that  was in the original recipe.

Make your own vanilla ice cream to top cobbler. This one is made with 6 egg yolks, 2 cups cream, 1 cup milk, 150 grams sugar, 1 to 2 vanilla beans, scraped, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1 tablespoon honey and 1 tablespoon gourbon

The result was a smaller, more manageable cobbler and since I didn’t change the biscuit topping one bit I liked that it covered about 90 percent of the filling instead of leaving large spaces in the original recipe. The filling I devised was 3 cups blueberries, 1 cup  blackberries and several peaches and 1 cup strawberries (available from growers who cultimate ever-bearing), which measured 5 heaping cups. It was sweetened with less sugar (about 1/2 to 3/4 cup, depending on tartness of fruit) and I used a tablespoon of tapioca starch as the thickener.  This is not easy to find but Hannaford carries it. It’s a great thickener for fruit pies and cobblers, which dissolves completely in the fruit juices rather than tricky tapioca pearls or cornstarch or flour.

Blackberry cobbler topped with crushed sugar

Still my favorite cobbler is the kind made with a pastry topping.  I make two styles: one that’s a crunchy cobbler where pie dough is mixed in the filling that acts as a thickener.  It has an amazingly gooey texture and works well with peaches or apples.  See the recipe link.

The other style is one I made earlier this week to bring to a friend’s house for dinner on Peak’s Island.

I made the dough the night before and baked the cobbler first thing in the morning.  The unusual ingredients are something I borrowed from cookbook author Edna Lewis who uses crushed sugar flavored with cardamom.

In the recipe link, you’ll see three recipes for cobbler that I posted in an entry last August (August 16th, 20016).  I made one change, however, and used a very rich short crust loaded with butter from High-View Farm in Harrison, who makes one of the richest, fattiest butters from raw cream, and to it a touch of freshly rendered lard, which will give you a very flaky crust.